Erinna was a great comfort, when she had time for me. She was nineteen, a silver, and she had real work to do, learning to sail the Excellence and fighting in the Platean troop. She was my friend, and she had loved Mother. She was lovely-looking, with olive skin and fair hair, which, since she had been assigned to the ship, she wore cut short on the nape of her neck but still curling up over her broad forehead. When she was free she listened to me talk and often did things with me to distract me. She even organized our calculus class into working on our own. Axiothea, one of the Masters from Amazonia, came over once to help us. Erinna was really kind to me during this time, and I treasured every moment I could spend with her. But she was frequently busy, and much in demand, and I didn’t want to waste too much of her precious free time. And naturally, I couldn’t explain to her about Father properly, because really explaining about Father would have meant talking about his true nature.

Erinna is the one who suggested that I should try to write an autobiography. She said that writing things down sometimes helped her to come to terms with them. She said that Mother had told her that, years before. Because it was her advice, and before that Mother’s, I began it, and I found that like wrestling, it helped at the time. So I dealt with my grief by writing autobiography, working hard at the palaestra, and reading history.

The other person who really helped was Crocus. Crocus is a Worker, a robot, and he had been a close friend of Mother’s. We had long ago worked out a way for the Workers to write in wax so there wasn’t a permanent engraved record of every time they wished somebody joy, but he always carved what he wrote about Mother into the paving stones. He wanted to talk about debates they had shared, and he took me to the places where they’d had them. His responses were engraved into the marble, and it comforted us both when he engraved what Mother had said beside them, making them into full dialogues. He knew all about death and what happened to human souls—at least as much as anyone else. But he worried about his own soul, and Sixty-One’s, and the souls of the Workers Athene had taken with her after the Last Debate. We had enough spare parts for Crocus and Sixty-One to last indefinitely, but he wondered whether he should want his soul to move on. He wondered if he would become a human or an animal or another Worker. He mused about why Plato never mentioned Workers. Crocus could always distract me from my own thoughts. Sometimes he would come into Florentia and join me and Ficino when we were debating.